He set a manila envelope down on the table, then took the kettle away from her. “You make excellent sandwiches. As for the rest, I’m a very keen chef, so why don’t you sit and read whilst I make us some tea.” He slid her a look. “What have you eaten your whole life?”
“Whatever the local coffee shop shoved across the counter at me. When I was feeling particularly ambitious, I hit the nearest juice bar.” She smiled briefly. “I eat lots of peanut butter and jelly.”
He made a noise of horror, then started fiddling with her stove. She left him to it and opened the envelope he’d put on her table. She slid a folder out and opened it.
She felt a silence descend.
She only realized that, actually, because Nathaniel wasn’t moving any longer. She looked up to find him watching her. He lifted an eyebrow.
“Worthy of your wall?”
“This is a copy of a parish register.”
“And so it is,” he agreed. He paused. “It was a gift from Alexander Smith, if you’re curious. He thought since he was providing me with so many juicy details about Sheldon, he would tuck in a few other things I might find interesting.”
“He is a first-class snoop, isn’t he?”
Nathaniel leaned back against her counter. “Absolutely. I hesitate to introduce the two of you for fear you would set your sights on tumbling superpowers. But let me distract you with a little interesting tidbit I didn’t realize until this morning: my favorite investigator Alexander Smith has a connection to our little enchanted forest in the person of his sister Elizabeth.”
“Is she Scottish?” Emma asked in surprise.
“By marriage,” Nathaniel said slowly. “She’s married to James MacLeod.”
“Patrick’s brother.”
“The very same.”
Emma frowned. “You know, Patrick said something to me about his family marrying Americans in droves, but I thought nothing of it at the time.”
“I guess you could call it a pattern,” he said solemnly.
She scowled at him. “You just wait until I really get going here.”
“I’m half afraid of what you’ll find,” he admitted.
“You probably should be. So, why does it matter that Elizabeth is married to James MacLeod?”
“Dig through those papers and see what you think.” He smiled, then turned around to deal with the kettle.
She watched him gather things for tea, then looked at what was on the table in front of her. She flipped to the first page and realized quickly that she was looking at a genealogy of the Clan MacLeod that stretched back into the early Middle Ages. Nothing was highlighted, though, which gave her the opportunity to draw her own conclusions about what she thought was important.
She frowned thoughtfully over the players operating at the turn of the fourteenth century. There was a laird, James, born in 1279. While that in itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy, it was interesting that he had a brother named Patrick. She was also quite interested to learn that those MacLeod boys had had a cousin named Ian, who had died in a Fergusson dungeon on a date she couldn’t quite read. Then again, she couldn’t really read the death dates for either James or Patrick.
Thatwasinteresting.
She looked at Nathaniel as he set a cup in front of her and put a cozy over the teapot.
“We have some smudges here,” she noted.
“This is a private parish register,” he said easily. “The more public one puts death dates somewhere around 1320 for all three of those lads.”
“So young,” she murmured.
“And yet still so alive,” he said sourly. “I know this because our good Lord Patrick said as much, though I was doing my damndest not to believe him at the time. Apparently he was born six years after his brother James, way back in 1285, and he somehow trotted through that bloody forest and set up shop in the current day.”
“Then those pub rumors are true,” she said.
“It would seem so.” He poured tea, then sat back and looked at her. “Hard to deny that business there, especially given who sent it to me. If anyone would know family secrets, you would think it might be Alexander Smith, James MacLeod’s brother-in-law. I’m guessing that Alex probably has a sword in the back of his closet.”
